Today Brittany and I took a walk over to the Arboretum to sample some of the temporary and man-made ponds, as part of an ongoing metacommunity study. With the warm spring we’ve been having, the zooplankton are in full swing, rivalling the communities we found in Churchill last year in August!
Here Brittany is marvelling at the zooplankton and many aquatic insects:
Notice the tea-coloured water, it is stained by tannins leaching from the fallen leaves and detritus. We had some visitors while sampling…
This goose seemed particularly interested in our sampling efforts. Stay tuned for more posts on fieldwork, as the Planktoneers get ready to return to Churchill. It has been almost a year since we were up there…good thing we went sampling today, need to get our pond legs and net arms ready!
